Advent Sundays part 2, Christmas and New Year: Change, my dear. And it seems not a moment too soon!

My last post left us with some smooth concrete where there had been a heap of earth, lots of biscuits and tea, and some gloopy, sticky glue holding up the wallpaper. I have to say that putting up the wallpaper completely transformed the kitchen! I actually wanted to move in right then and there! But there was still so much more to be done, namely this: tiles for the "Loch", installing the new kitchen worktop, putting up a new plasterboard wall in front of the old brick wall in the "Loch", and the biggest and last piece of work for 2014: the new windows for the kitchen and the bedroom.

Operation "Let's hide the ugly brick wall", step 1: put up metal framing. 

The amazing, Photoshop-savvy Marcel very kindly combined all of our plasterboard images into one neat panorama.

 So, with the ugly wall well hidden, we were able to get started on the tiles. We'd ben visiting countless DIY stores to find the right colour tiles before stumbling upon those purely by accident in the very last store we went to. The darker ones are the same ones we had already used in the kitchen, thus creating a bridge between the old floor and the new.

A growing tile floor.

And the finished floor, complete with the dark brown edges, but still missing the grout.

 While this was going on there was another new arrival to our kitchen. Say hello to the brand-new, extremely shiny kitchen worktop! Isn't it fantastic?

 In fact, it is so lovely that none of us want to cut out the holes for the sink and the hob!

This leaves us with the big one: new windows!

 The old windows had to go.

 Single-glazing, ancient wooden frames: our local energy provider would have loved them! As they weren't exactly energy-efficient, our bill would have been astronomical.

 So, away with them.

 Of course we had to pick the coldest day of the year, just after some heavy snowfall to cut two huge holes in our wall!

 But it was definitely worth it. Here they are, our new windows.

 Removing the frames.

 Veeery carefully!

 No windows!

 New windows!

 The bedroom window.

 And the kitchen window.

 December 30, 2014: it was soooo cold! That cup of tea was well-earned.

 From the outside.

 Looking good.

 Looks great from inside, too.

 Final bit of tidying.

 Almost ready for our first dinner! New Year's Eve 2014, home-made pizza, my plates, real cutlery, a nicely decorated trestle table, and we were ready.

Happy New Year 2015!